If you claim to love wine, then drink the real stuff

If you claim to love wine, then drink the real stuff

Most college students will drink almost anything as long as it gets them drunk. Keystone, cheap tequila and Two Buck Chuck are all great choices when you’re really just looking to get plastered. Yet sometimes, you may want to actually enjoy your alcohol.

We all know the typical wine-lover in college is portrayed as a white girl sipping Barefoot while talking about her wine appreciation. Brands like Yellowtail, Sutter Home and Barefoot are all great for any broke person – they’re cheap and get the job done. But if your favorite wine comes from any of those brands, please stop talking about how much you love wine.

Renowned wine critic Eric Asimov once said to think about “wine as food.” If that’s the case, then brands like Sutter Home are essentially the McDonald’s of wine.

If you don’t care what you’re drinking or seriously cannot afford this luxury, then continue drinking it. If you want to talk on and on about how much you love wine, please learn the difference.

Treasury Wine Estates is one of the top wine manufacturers of brands you can find at your local Kroger, such as 19 Crimes and Sterling Vineyards. Bianca Bosker, author of the recent book “Cork Dork” and a digital journalist, visited one of their tasting centers to learn how they make wine.

Instead of creating a wine, the company polls consumers and then creates the exact product they claim to want, usually with a mixture of additives. According to Bosker’s New York Times article, these can be anything from “Ovo-Pure (powdered egg whites), isinglass (fish bladder granulate),” liquid oak tannin or calcium carbonate. If that’s not enough, companies can add a “dose of Mega Purple, a grape-juice concentrate that has been called a ‘magic potion’ for its ability to deepen color and fruit flavors.”

On their website, Yellowtail Wines describes the winemaking process and states that many wines, like Chardonnay and most reds, are stored in oak barrels for flavoring. When it comes to additives, the company says to check their nutritional value chart, but it says nothing about additives, because companies don’t have to disclose this information. It does say that all of their wines spend zero time in oak barrels though.

To them, and people that truly love the drink, wine isn’t a product but a form of art. As with food, many growers try to make the most complex tastes using the purest ingredients under the best conditions. Though this process has changed as demand and technology increases, the idea is the same: they value wine as the centuries-old luxury that it is.

Yet most people crave sugar and want wines resembling a Dr. Pepper more so than a Burgundy Chardonnay. And that’s honestly fine. Everyone has different tastes, and it’s possible to satisfy those tastes while also supporting vineyards utilizing little to no additives, respecting the land they grow on and valuing wine.

If you have friends who also like wine, have tastings together where you each bring a bottle under $15 to share – you would probably spend the same amount at Fry Street anyways. College is the best place to find mass amounts of people down to drink, so find the ones who are down to drink the good stuff.

We spend a little extra money on anything which matters to us: organic food, sustainable packaging or a nice meal out. Wine is a luxury, of course, but if you have an extra $5 and the slightest bit of interest, you can support an industry that’s slowly being replaced with processed plunk. And then on nights you just need to chug anything, it’s okay to buy the cheap stuff. We won’t tell.